Last year, I wrote (here) about how wrong I felt it was that SlideShare call their annual contest a “presentation” contest, when in fact it only features slide-decks. I believe semantics are important, and fixing the wrong equation of ‘slides = presentation’ is the first step to curing the communication problems of many companies and individuals.

I was therefore very interested to see that there is a new presentation-sharing site – and I can call this one a presentation-sharing site because it shows slides together with the video of the presenter. You no longer have to choose whether to upload your video to YouTube or your slides to SlideShare. This does both. It’s called present.me.

To find out more, I interviewed two of the founders, Spencer Lambert and Richard Garnett, both of whom are presentation experts, and who were just as unhappy as I was about the absence of a good site for sharing video and slides together. (Only they decided to do something about it.) Now to be clear, I am not involved with present.me and I did not even know these guys a week ago, so I am not trying to sell it. But based on this interview, I do think it is quite promising.

The video of the interview is below (Spencer is on the left, Richard is on the right, and I’m not there at all in case you were wondering), and I’ve also included a transcript for those of you who may find it easier to read than to watch the video. In any case, I recommend you take a look at the site, experiment with it (basic accounts are free), and think how you might use it in your business. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

Transcript: philpresents.com interview with present.me

9 May 2011

Phil Waknell: I’m delighted to have with me Spencer Lambert and Richard Garnett from a new company called Present.me which aims to be an alternative to the other slide or presentation-sharing applications, but I’ll let them say a few words about it. Spencer and/or Richard, can you give me an elevator pitch, just 20-30 seconds: what is Present.me?

Richard Garnett: Present.me is an opportunity for presenters to tell their story in slide form and also through their faces and their voices. I was an actor, I help people to present properly and I know it’s not just about the slides, it’s about how they present the slides, how they connect personally with the audience. And it’s an opportunity, through the cloud, for somebody to present their slides and record themselves through their webcam presenting them, and then we join it up and they can publish it. If you like, it’s YouTube marries SlideShare.

PW: So why are YouTube and SlideShare on their own not good enough? What does Present.me bring that they don’t – or couldn’t?

Spencer Lambert: With SlideShare, it’s just your slides so that’s only a small part of the story – you don’t get to hear the presenter, see the presenter, and with YouTube you don’t get the full effect of the graphics. A great presentation is a waltz between the presenter and their graphics, and when they are together they work very well.

RG: It’s like a great double-act, and it amazed us because we’re in the business with a lot of corporate clients, that there wasn’t something out there that was able to do it quickly, easily and simply. And there are options, but they’re complicated – a lot of our clients aren’t techies and can’t do it; or you hire a production company, which is really expensive… so we wanted to build something that somebody could do just from their desktop or their laptop, easily and simply because that’s what great software does. We wanted to create something that even I could use!

PW: So that’s the acid test – if Richard can use it, anyone can use it!

SL: Yes, and he’s a hard man to please!

RG: I’m very stupid!

PW: So why are you the right people to be creating this? What made you decide that you are the team to create Present.me?

SL: I think it’s a culmination of all our experiences. We’ve all come from slightly different areas in a related backgrounds, Richard with his corporate training, me with the graphics side – I’ve been a presentation designer for a long time…

RG: He’s a PowerPoint genius!

SL: …and then there’s Mike who’s also been working in the presentation sphere as well, but he’s been doing a lot of online software, so as a culmination of all our experiences it seemed like the perfect project. And there’s Charlie who works with Richard as a presentation coach.

RG: And we’ve been incredibly lucky to find two fantastic coders who write in… what are those strange languages?

SL: They code in Flex and ColdFusion, those are the two main codes behind the site, and they are fantastic, great guys – they take what we say and turn it into reality, which is perfect.

PW: OK so it’s a great idea and a great team. Now what do you think are the key success factors, and what is it going to take for you to get a step ahead of people like SlideShare who could decide to switch on a video option overnight?

SL: I think the key to the whole thing is just to keep innovating. You can’t protect a lot of this stuff, there’s no IP around what we are doing – well there may be some but is it worth us investing the time, money and effort to protect it? I don’t think we can. So really what we need to do is to keep innovating, creating new ideas – we’ve got loads of ideas in the pipeline that we really want to bring out, and just keep bringing them out, one by one, and keeping ahead of everyone else.

RG: And I’m not a technologist, but I love my iPhone, because it’s so incredibly easy to use, and what we want to create is a site that is incredibly easy for people to use and which is constantly innovating, and I think for that, the challenge I give these guys is, let’s listen to the audience, let’s listen to people who are using it, let’s take their ideas, let’s feed them in, because you constantly have to stay ahead, and we’ll be led by the people who use the site. The ideas you’ve given us already Phil about the apps, for example, all of that is terrific feedback – our challenge is to build it and implement it, and quickly.

PW: At the moment you’ve been basing your technology as far as I’m aware on a Flash front-end, which makes it more difficult with iOS and Apple’s well-known dislike of having Flash on its devices, so do you have plans to get around that?

SL: Yes, we do. Our first step is to build an HTML5 player – that’s an easy win for us. The back-end technology supports us to be able to put an HTML5 front-end on, so we can very quickly do that, and then we’re looking at building apps – cross-platform apps if we can. So something that we can get onto all those devices, because that’s where a lot of it is ultimately going to be consumed – I don’t know what the statistics say at the moment but it’s probably 30% of all internet traffic is consumed on mobile devices, that’s only going to grow, we’ve got to be there, it’s the consumer end is where it’s all at really.

PW: So I’m a consumer – what would I use Present.me for, apart from uploading a presentation that I’ve done for people to see later on? Are there some other uses that you’re already thinking of?

RG: So education – we’re already finding that teachers are using it as a platform for kids to load up presentations. I’ll give you a simple one – my daughter is 14, and we went on a trip; in the past I’d take a camcorder and take hours of footage and never have the time to edit it – or I’d take photos and do a slideshow but it wouldn’t capture her voice. Now what present.me allows you to do is to upload pictures of a trip, and then I got my daughter to talk about the trip and how fantastic it was. So I’ve got the photos, I’ve got her as she is at 14, the way she sounds, the way she looks, joined together – that’s just a tiny little application. And incidentally she’s talking about a trip to Bilbao, so somewhere like TripAdvisor where you have comments about hotels and holidays, you want some photos but you also want somebody live. And then we were thinking about PDF files, to talk about documents…

SL: Yes, one of the problems that our clients always tell us is they might have to share a document but there’s usually one part of the document they want to focus in on, and no matter how you write it, you never quite get the meaning across. So imagine you could upload a document, zoom into a part of the PDF, and highlight a bit of it and talk around it, have a discussion, and tell them exactly what you are trying to get over.

RG: We have a coach, a mentor from KPMG who happens to be a client of mine, and he works on M&A (Merger & Acquisition) when companies are bought and sold, and there are lawyers fees, huge fees, just swapping documents to and fro – you’d be much better doing that live with loading up a PDF, and we’re about 5-6 weeks away from having a live solution. So that’s a tiny application and I’m sure business will come up with loads more. So we were thinking today – in future, instead of a CV, why couldn’t you have a 3-minute “this is me”, and companies would have a much clearer idea of whether somebody had impact by their ability to put together a presentation. There are folks we’re talking to at the moment who’ve got algorithms that can measure your charisma through a webcam. There’s a scientist at MIT who’s got an algorithm which can measure that and we’re looking to adapt his technology so you could do that through your webcam. So wouldn’t it be great for us presentation skills guys, when somebody presents into a webcam, we could give them a percentage of how dull or interesting they are in terms of their performance? It’s just a tiny thing that’s in the pipeline, but it’s doable: the technology is there, it just isn’t being used yet.

PW: Effectively the sky is the limit and it sounds like you have lots of great ideas on how this could be used. I heard you mention live meetings there, so in fact your competitors are not just SlideShare but also people like WebEx.

SL: Absolutely, and I think it’s going to create a fair bit of noise once we can add live in – people are already paying for that, so when we go to approach them, as a business case, they’ve already got budget allocated for live, so adding recording as well, it’s a no-brainer almost.

RG: What I find fascinating is that the non-corporate world has discovered video on the web via YouTube and it’s growing hugely. Business doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Business still lives in a world of documents, and words, and emails, and I think there are massive applications for video on the web. I’ll give you a tiny example: one of my clients pitches 1000 times a year for many millions of pounds worth of work. They have no record at all of those pitches. They’ve got no record of the good ones or the bad ones – they might just have a couple of slides. But wouldn’t it be great to capture some of those fantastic pitches?

PW: Lots of opportunities there. So down to the basics: I can upload PowerPoint and Keynote files? Anything else?

SL: At the moment it’s just PowerPoint. We are building the ability to upload PDFs. At the moment there is no server-side way of uploading Keynote files – Apple appear to have restricted that unfortunately, they’re probably keeping that for themselves I would imagine, so if you’ve got a Keynote file, at the moment you’d have to save it as a PowerPoint file which isn’t ideal; in the future, in the next few weeks, you can save it as a PDF and that can just go straight in. Then probably further down the line we’ll have the ability to upload Word documents and maybe spreadsheets too.

PW: It’s good that there is some solution for Keynote presentations because a lot of presentation designers do use Keynote nowadays, but you’ve got PowerPoint, that’s still the majority of the market so I can see why you’ve started there. Now a question about animations and transitions – can we assume this is like SlideShare and it’s effectively a static slide and then another static slide, or have you got animations in there?

SL: At the moment it is just static slides, and the free account will always be just static slides – that’s a kind of restriction along with a 15-minute time limit – but if you’ve got a paid account, you’ll keep your slide animations. At the moment that feature isn’t finished so we’ve got some issues to try to iron out there, but once that’s finished…

SL: I’m not saying yes or no to that at the moment, there are still some issues around that, but that’s definitely going to happen at some time in the future…

RG: Thankyou Phil, this is a really useful call!

SL: I’m not committing to that one right now in terms of a date!

PW: You just mentioned elements of a charging plan, so obviously you’ve got a free model for basic users who are going to have a restriction on the time they can upload videos and also I guess a maximum total per month?

SL: Yes, there’s a limit of 10 per month that you can upload as a free user.

PW: That’s already plenty for a lot of people, but then as a premium user, you don’t have those limits, and you don’t have adverts as well I guess?

SL: That’s right, no adverts, and you’ll have slide animations, and privacy – that’s another option you get as a paid user, so you can have your presentations hidden on the main site but still send a link out to people with a password or whatever.

PW: For companies, that is probably going to be very important, and that’s an area where I guess your competitors that we’ve already mentioned don’t have that kind of solution, apart from probably WebEx.

SL: Yes, one of two of them, but we’ve also got in the pipeline the business version, which would be a private space for multiple users, so if you’re a company, you’ll have your own subdomain, so http://yourcompany.present.me, your users would log into that, and you’d have your own private space where you could share presentations, so they would never actually appear on the main site unless you wanted them to.

PW: Well we’ve come to the end of the interview. Since we’re all presentation specialists here, we know that people will only remember one, two, maximum three things, so what are the one, two or three things you want people to remember from this interview?

RG: The fact that we are YouTube marrying SlideShare, and the children are fantastic, and please, my beg and my ask would be, if you’re in the presentation world, try it and please tell us what you think, and most importantly of all, tell us how it could be better because we’re a small start-up, we can build it, and wouldn’t it be great if we could build a solution that we all want and that we can use. We haven’t got all the answers, but your input would be fantastic.

PW: So it’s a presentation platform for presentation specialists, by presentation specialists. Thanks for your time today, and I look forward to seeing how present.me evolves.

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Phil Presents

Presentations are everywhere. Sadly, most of them are boring and ineffective. Phil Presents aims to explore the art and science of communication, and help you to think differently about presenting.

Phil Waknell is Chief Inspiration Officer at Ideas on Stage, the leading European presentation specialists. Apart from being a speaker, speechwriter, trainer, coach and writer, Phil is married, with two boys and a cat, and is passionate about cricket. He is still mostly English.

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